Asset Management

I was a mess. Whatever or however much I’d drunk last night had not been kind to me. A pallid, gaunt, unkempt figure stared back at me. Perhaps it hadn’t all been the drink. Past noon and still below zero outside. That weird milky light that never went away this far north.

“Who should I be today?” Bile tickled the back of my throat as I spoke to my frankly horrifying reflection. “Perhaps Bret, he hasn’t had an airing for a while.” Fighting the urge to double up over the toilet, I began to put on my human suit. A splash of water, a spray of deodorant, thick contacts, a wrinkled suit, almost there Bret. Just some gel to take my hair from mad-scientist barnet to coiffed salt-and-pepper respectability. Done. I was Bret. For now.

The room was a disaster. Yesterday’s persona would have to deal with it. Down the service lift with a stolen staff key to the basement, through the grinding hum of the hotel warrens and out onto the street. Filthy mounds of slush in a perpetual cycle of freezing and melting. Bret would be glad to see that back of this place. So would I.

Shoulder bag and contents, the only things of any real value, check. On to the airport, taxi paid with cash, contactless ticket purchase and self-service check in, fake-ish passport flashed. Three changes, it was a long way to eastern China.

Twenty two hours and three bags of peanuts later I was now Bai Zheng and standing in front of a large house I’d never seen before. The local fixer had assured me this small suburb was where I should be. It didn’t look like it was owned by someone who could afford me. I felt greasy and ached from the journey, like a rubber band fidgeted with too many times.

A kindly faced woman dressed in pastel tones silently showed me in, sat me down in the blandly furnished reception room and, unbidden, served me some unappetising looking tea. I guzzled it down regardless, rudeness to one’s client was ill advised.

His eyes, predator eyes, seemed to enter the room first, followed by the gait of someone who paused for no one. Smartly dressed, he sat opposite me stiff and tense. An ugly silence suffocated the late afternoon calm. I had seen two separate pairs of children’s shoes in the entranceway but couldn’t hear any sound of them.

I took out the box from my shoulder bag. About the size of a hefty hardback, I slowly unwrapped the mandala printed silk it had come shrouded in. That pressure again when I gazed upon it, like someone about to press their thumbs into my eyes. The man stared fervently at it in my hands.

“Tell me how you found it.” The first thing he had said to me. It felt like the first thing that had been said in this house for a long time.

“Your… manuscript described a place in the Tajikistan countryside that didn’t exist. Just a crater blasted wasteland. Afghan military had been through, they were killed - slaughtered really - by Uzbek militia during a border skirmish. They sold it to Ukrainian tourists who died in a building fire; the box was the only thing undamaged by the inferno. Auctioned to an antiques dealer who used it to incompetently smuggle drugs into Europe. He died during arrest under mysterious circumstances. Police lockup to bratvá warehouse - several fires there as well - then via an oil tanker to Alaska. Didn’t know crude could spoil. Card game cheat to a rural dive bar.” Months of slog all came spilling out. I gingerly put the dark wood box on the coffee table between us, avoiding touching the dark red pictographic engravings. “And now to you.”

The man’s jaw was clenched as if to stop himself salivating. I had already been paid, in full and the thought of just sublimating into some hedonistic binge in a backwater town had crossed my mind. Sitting here now, I was glad I hadn’t. If it wasn’t the box making me feel like I wanted to pull my fingernails out, it was the man knotting my stomach and ringing my fight-or-flight bell.

“And you didn’t open it.” It wasn’t a question. Eyes still fixed on the box.

“As instructed.” I answered anyway.

Eons passed. Motes of dust drifted through the lazy light filtering through the floor to ceiling windows.

“If you have need of my services again, please do get in touch.” I placed a business card near as I dared to the box. It had a tor address and my job title on it. Pushing myself to standing, more to break the awkwardness than anything, I expected a handshake, a bow, some kind of acknowledgement. Only silence.

Seeing myself out, I heard - or felt - something between a scream and claws on slate, like a rasp drawn across the senses. I turned, halfway through pulling the inner door closed. Red light spilled out from the reception room where I had just been, thick and profane. My legs knew what to do before my head did. I ran. Hard.